Alarm clock fails as of Jan 1

yes we know, did you not see all the other tons of posts about it instead of starting a new one.

Good post. I know that I did not see this or any other post about the alarm clock issue because I was unaware of any problem until this morning - 1/2/11 - when my iPhone alarm did not go off at 5:30 AM so that I could start my trip home from vacation. Same issue with my wife's phone as well.

This is an outrageous problem to be surprised with - especially on a travel day. For me, the clock has been a critical component of my iPhone. You just don't think about an alarm clock setting malfunctioning because of a date change - especially since previous years presented no similar issues. It was an application that I could rely upon without having to think about it's functioning until now.

same here.. just updated the software but nothing happened..
so cannot use the alarm clock now... i realized yesterday morning when i overslept... is there any solution?

Yes, use a recurring alarm or wait until 3rd Jan when it will resolve itself.

This is an outrageous problem to be surprised with - especially on a travel day.

An alarm clock not working is outrageous? I can't believe how people are getting so worked up over this, especially when it will work on Jan 3rd.

<Edited by Host>

...and an alarm clock on a phone no less!

I could understand the outrage if it was the calling or internet access features that had stopped working on Jan 1st, but just the alarm clock...?

+1

I'm dating a new girl that I offered to drive to the airport this morning at 6am for a flight to Puerto Rico (vacation).

My non-reoccurring alarm didn't go off. Bug. We missed her flight. The new, last minute flight cost us $600 extra this morning.

People now use their phones to wake them up. It's a simple feature. They're battery backed-up. Apple knew about this issue before it cost me $600 and made an incredibly awkward and rushed morning. They could have emailed everyone they knew had an iPhone with iOS 4 OS about this, or had AT&T send a txt message. Something. They did nothing.

No more iOS devices for me. This one error cost me more than the phone. More than my iPad.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/01/appleadmits_new_years_alarmbug.html

No more iOS devices for me.

And you think clock bugs don't or won't ever affect any other operating system?

Hey. I just want to say how disappointing this is. Especially since it's the second alarm clock issue that the 4 has had. I know it's a relatively minor issue as far as capabilities go but for those of us who have really started using the iPhone as a major part of our tech lives this is big. I missed appointments this morning. It was frustrating. I hope that whoever was in charge of this part of the phone realize that they screwed up BIG. it just gives all those Droid/google/MS people more stones to throw.

Come on apple get it right and get it fixed!!!!!

paulcb wrote:

This is an outrageous problem to be surprised with - especially on a travel day.

An alarm clock not working is outrageous? Get over yourself. I can't believe how people are getting so worked up over this, especially when it will work on Jan 3rd.

I was 5 hrs late for work today because of this :-/ that is something to be worked up over.

Not everyone is experiencing this one-off alarm bug. I've tried this multiple times today on both my iPhone and iPad, and my one-off alarms have worked perfectly. So, there's something a bit more complicated occurring here that will take a bit more testing to narrow down and fix.

It is an outrageous problem, particularly since it's the second time it's happened, and the bug does not exist in IOS 3.x. As a professional developer I'm all to aware of the way in which bugs creep in to the system, but this kind of thing indicates extremely sloppy control. This should have been caught in multiple places, not least: 1) test suites for the changed alarm code; 2) regression tests for alarm functionality; 3) functional testing suites.

Apple's response has not exactly been deafening. If this was in open source software a patch would have been forthcoming in hours; Apple haven't even conceded there's a problem.

My next phone will most likely be Android, and my next computer will run Linux; I've had too many bad experiences with the Apple approach.

I've just done some more testing and found this bug is apparently limited to the built-in Clock application. One-off alarms set in the Calendar app work fine, as do alarms set within third party apps, such as Best Alarm. So, it would be wise to test the app you use before relying on it.

"I was 5 hrs late for work today because of this :-/ that is something to be worked up over."

Agreed. I set two alarms last night to make sure that I got up at 4 am for a cross-country flight. Naturally they didn't go off, I missed my flight and I'm now in the hole $750 for a new ticket.

This is not something to scoff at. Glitches happen, but there's no reason to expect an alarm clock (even on a phone) to fail. Plenty of people rely on their phones to wake them up, and Apple let us down here. Since they knew about the problem yesterday, I wish they would have alerted customers about the workaround via text or email (especially since today is one of the biggest travel days of the year).

Frustrating to say the least.